Sara Bannerman joined McMaster in 2011 and was appointed Canada Research Chair in Communication Policy and Governance in 2016. She holds a Bachelor of Music from Queen’s University, and an MA (2004) and a PhD (2009) in communication studies from Carleton University.

Dr. Bannerman researches communications policy and governance. She researches traditional forms of governance such as copyright, intellectual property, and privacy law, as well as governance undertaken through non-state actors: governance by code, technologies, and private companies. For example, she examines:

Privacy in the context of networked technologies and networked selves

Cultural funding, including government funding (grants), private company funding (labels), and technologies (crowdfunding and Kickstarter)

Dr. Bannerman has supervised projects on social media and the music industry, hactivism, libel, internet memes, artificial intelligence and intellectual property, copyright and employment, crowdfunding music, activist use of social media and blogging, the right to tinker, broadcasting policy, online public consultations, and the use of twitter by politicians and in elections.

She teaches on research methods (employing interviews, online surveys, legal research, policy research, and archival / historical research in her own work), communication theory, the political economy of communications, intellectual property, communications policy and law, and media and social activism.

Dr. Bannerman is a Governing Board member of the International Society for the Theory and History of Intellectual Property and a Vice Chair of the Law Section of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR).